If you're going to Dallas, this looks like fun!
Dear ninenot,
LOL. Dallas is for the bigshots. Out of our whole state convention, I think we send less than two dozen delegates and alternates. Out of 25,000 Knights in our state.
We had a related issue come up at our state convention in May. We had two resolutions which urged the bishops to publicly rebuke anti-life Catholic politicians, and consider sanctions against them.
Out of over 140 Councils, one Council objected. A group of college kids north of Baltimore. They were "out-debated." The resolutions passed with two negative votes each (each Council gets two votes).
So, approximately 99.3% of the statewide representatives of the Knights of Columbus in the jurisdiction of Maryland went on record urging sanctions against pro-death "Catholic" politicians. I'll take that result any day. I'm proud to have been an alternate delegate at that convention.
As for denying membership in the Knights of Columbus, that's not so easy. Once a man is a member, it is difficult to take membership away from him. And usually, whether a man may become a member is left to the membership and the Chaplain (always a priest) of each Council.
Only the Chaplain of a particular Council may decide that a man is insufficiently "Catholic" to be a Knight. This is a practical application of the Catholic belief in subsidiarity. So, a Coundil with a less-than-rigorous Chaplain may be lax in its determination of Catholicity. In an organization with over 1.7 million members, and over 10,000 subsidiary Councils, "quality control" gets hard.
Then, there is the insurance thing. Many Knights purchase insurance through the Order. They must retain membership to stay eligible for certain benefits. Revoking the membership of a man with insurance from the Order starts getting us involved with the insurance commissioners in each state.
But mutual insurance was one of the first things Fr. McGivney worked for when he established the Knights of Columbus. When poor, immigrant, Catholic men died young, they often had no life insurance, in part because life insurance companies often refused to sell insurance to poor, immigrant, Catholic men. Fr. McGivney founded the Knights in part to specifically care for the widows and orphans of Catholic men. This developed into the largest fraternal organization insurance program in the world, providing protection for hundreds of thousands of families.
But life is full of trade-offs, and the trade-off of providing Catholic families with high-quality, solid insurance programs is getting involved with government regulation.
We do our best, but sometimes it may seem lacking.
Those who would criticize are ignorant, and verge on anti-Catholic.
sitetest